Open URL

Description

Quickly open files, folders, web URLs or other URLs from anywhere in Sublime Text.

Install

Look for Open URL using the Package Manager

How to use

Put the cursor inside a file / folder / URL / word and run the command. It automatically expands the selection until it hits delimiter chars, which can be changed in the settings (see below).

Alternatively, highlight the text you want to open. If text is highlighted the selection is not expanded.

Here's a bunch of ways you can run the command.

• ctrl+u (OSX), ctrl+alt+u (Linux/Windows)
• right-click > Open URL
• alt + double-click
• shift+cmd+p, then look for Open URL

Give it a try

Copy the items below to Sublime Text. Place your cursor inside any one of them and hit ctrl+u for OSX, or ctrl+alt+u for Linux/Windows.

• $HOME/Desktop
• https://news.ycombinator.com
• google.com
• search_for_me

How does it work?

If your selection is a file or a folder, you can choose to edit it (open with Sublime Text), or reveal it (open with macOS Finder/Windows File Explorer/Linux File Manager).

Opening files and folders is super convenient. Both can be specified with absolute paths, paths relative to the currently open file, or paths relative to the root of the currently open project. Env vars and the alias ~ are expanded.

If your selection is a URL, it opens immediately in a new tab in your default web browser. You can omit the scheme (http://) if you want and Open URL will add it for you.

If Open URL fails to open a web URL, you might have to change the path to your web browser executable. See the web_browser_path setting below.

If your selection is none of the above, and you haven't configured custom commands for special URLs using other_custom_commands, you'll be presented with two options:

• modify the selection and try again
• search for the selection using one of your configured web_searchers
  • the only web searcher that ships with Open URL is Google search
  • to add others, read more in the “Settings” section below

Shortcuts

Don't want to choose from menu items to open a file or a folder? Look for Open URL (Skip Menu) in the Command Palette. To create a key binding for this, open Preferences: Key Bindings from the Command Palette, and add the following:

{ "keys": ["your+key+binding"], "command": "open_url", "args": { "show_menu": false } },

This will open files in Sublime Text for editing, or reveal folders in the Finder, without showing the menu first.

Running shell commands on files, folders or special URLs

Open URL provides a few settings you can configure to run custom shell commands on files, folders, or special URLs, such as FTP URLs:

• file_custom_commands
• folder_custom_commands
• other_custom_commands (for special URLs, i.e. neither files, folders, nor web URLs)

The custom command settings should point to an array of objects that can have up to 5 properties:

• label, required: the label for the command in the dropdown menu
• commands required: a string, or an array of shell arguments, to which the URL is appended; if string/array contains the $url placeholder, this placeholder is replaced with the URL, and URL is not appended to end of string/array
• pattern, optional: the command only appears if the URL matches this pattern
• os optional: the command only appears for this OS; one of ('osx', 'windows', 'linux')
• kwargs, optional: kwargs that are passed to subprocess.Popen

For example, the reveal command for files uses the following file_custom_commands.

"file_custom_commands": [
  { "label": "reveal", "os": "osx", "commands": ["open", "-R"] },
  { "label": "reveal", "os": "windows", "commands": ["explorer", "/select,"] },
  { "label": "reveal", "os": "linux", "commands": ["nautilus", "--browser"] },
],

For another example, if you wanted to create OSX commands for adding a folder to the current project or for opening a folder in a new window, you could do something like this:

"folder_custom_commands": [
  { "label": "add to project", "os": "osx", "commands": ["open", "-a", "Sublime Text"] },
  { "label": "open in new window", "os": "osx", "commands": ["/usr/local/bin/subl"] },
],

Set cwd directory for shell command

You might want to choose the directory from which your shell command is executed. Python's subprocess library makes this easy with the cwd kwarg.

Open URL defines two special values for the cwd kwarg, "project_root" and "current_file". Using these values dynamically sets the working directory for the shell command to the project root, or the directory of the currently open file.

Check the Settings section, or run Open URL: Settings for examples.

URL / Path Transforms

Open URL has settings that let you transform your selected URL / path before attempting to open it.

Here are the settings with their default values:

• aliases: {}
• search_paths: ["src"]
• file_prefixes: []
• file_suffixes: [".js"]

The aliases dict is the first transform applied to the selected URL / path. It replaces each key in URL with the corresponding value.

The other transforms affect only file and folder paths. search_paths is a list of directories that are prepended to the path, file_prefixes are prepended to the filename, and file_suffixes are appended to the filename.

One path is generated for each combination of search path, file prefix and file suffix, and the first path that contains a directory or a file is opened.

Imagine you're building a JS app that you've set up to use absolute imports, relative to the src directory. Your app has a file at src/utils/module.js. Open URL can resolve this file using just utils/module. Very nice!

Multiple Cursors

Copy these URLs into Sublime Text and select both lines using multiple cursors, then run URL opener.

• https://www.google.com?q=hello
• https://www.google.com?q=there

The plugin opens both URLs simultaneously. You can use multiple cursors to open multiple files, folders, URLs, or a mix of all of them. Note that running Open URL with multiple cursors will skip the menu, as if you had run Open URL (Skip Menu), for all selections.

Settings

To customize these, hit shift+cmd+p to open the Command Palette, and look for Open URL: Settings.

• delimiters
  • characters at which auto-expansion of selected path stops, e.g. \t\n\r\"'`,*<>[](){}
  • the default settings are Markdown friendly
• trailing_delimiters
  • if any of these characters are seen at the end of a URL, they are recursively removed; for file and folder paths, URLs with and without trailing delimiters are tried; default is ;.:
• web_browser
  • the browser that Open URL uses to open new tabs; must be a string from this list
  • if you use an empty string, the “default browser” will be used
  • if you choose a browser that's not installed on your machine, Open URL will complain
• web_browser_path
  • the path to your web browser executable for opening web URLs
  • this setting overrides the default web browser and the web_browser setting
  • read the top answer here, or look in settings for examples
• web_searchers
  • if your selection isn't a file, a folder, or a URL, you can choose to pass it to a web searcher, which is just a URL that searches for the selected text
  • example: { "label": "google search", "url": "http://google.com/search?q=", "encoding": "utf-8" }
• aliases
  • first transform applied to URL, a dict with keys and values; replace each key in URL with corresponding value
  • example: { "{{BASE_PATH}}": "src/base" }
• search_paths
  • path transform; joins these directories to beginning of path
  • example: ["src"]
• file_prefixes
  • path transform; adds these prefixes to filename only
  • example: ["_"]
• file_suffixes
  • path transform; adds these suffixes to filename only
  • example: [".js", ".ts", ".tsx"]
• file_custom_commands
  • pass a file to shell commands whose pattern matches the file path
  • example, for copying the file path to the clipboard: { "label": "copy path", "commands": "printf '$url' | pbcopy" }
• folder_custom_commands
  • pass a folder to shell commands whose pattern matches the folder path
  • example, for opening the folder in iTerm: { "label": "open in terminal", "commands": [ "open", "-a", "/Applications/iTerm.app" ] }
• other_custom_commands
  • pass a URL which is neither a file, a folder, nor a web URL to shell commands whose pattern matches the URL
  • example, for opening a file at a specific line number: { "label": "subl: open file at line #", "pattern": ":[0-9]+$", "commands": [ "/usr/local/bin/subl" ], "kwargs": {"cwd": "project_root"} }

Project-Specific Settings

Some settings, especially the URL / path transforms like aliases, will probably vary between projects. Fortunately Open URL lets you specify project-specific settings in any .sublime-project file. Just put them in ["settings"]["open_url"].

{
  "folders": [
    {
      "path": "~/Library/Application Support/Sublime Text 3/Packages/OpenUrl"
    }
  ],
  "settings": {
    "open_url": {
      "file_suffixes": [".py"]
    }
  }
}

Project-specific settings override default and user settings.

Disable default key bindings

To do this, add "open_url.disable_default_key_bindings": true to Preferences.sublime-settings.

Release Notes

See Open URL's version history here.

Development

If you use pyenv, the 3.8 version in the .python-version file will cause problems because it's not a valid pyenv version.

To fix this, install some version 3.8.X with pyenv, then run ln -s ~/.pyenv/versions/3.8.X ~/.pyenv/versions/3.8.

Finally

See also: Google Spell Check.

Credits: Thanks goes to peterc for starting a forum thread about this topic and KatsuomiK for his gist, which were the inspiration for this plugin.

Author: @noahcoad writes software for the heck of it and to make life just a little more efficient.

Maintainer: @kylebebak.